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AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

arstechnica.com

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Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#51

Post by fakwandi_priv »

jofzar wrote: post #37
magicalhippo wrote: post #25

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

I really want a x3d because a game I play is heavily single threaded, I have the income and the financial stability but I can't in any good conscious upgrade to am5 with the ram prices. It's insane

AMD had an upgrade path with the 5700x3d, assuming you’re on AM4.

Just reading now that they went out of production half a year ago which is a shame. I was very impressed being able to upgrade with the same motherboard 6 years down the line.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#52

Post by jmyeet »

magicalhippo wrote: post #25

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

After randomly breaking the AM4 CPU and motherboard in my 4 year old PC last year and seeing that at the time I'd spent almost a new PC to get new parts and rebuild it. Less if I wanted to do a complete rebuild myself but I'm over building PCs. I've done that for years.

It was an expensive mistake as I bought a few options to experiment including a NUC and an M4 Mac Mini but eventually bought a 9800X3D 5070Ti PC for That's pretty lucky given what's happened since. I don't claim any kind of foresight about what would happen.

I do kind of want to take the parts I have and build another AM4 PC. The 5900XT is not a bad option with 16 cores for ~$300 but my DDR4 RAM is almost useless because the best deals now are for combos of CPU + motherboard + RAM at steep discounts.

You can get some good deals on prebuilts still. Not as good as 6+ months ago but still not bad. Costco has a 5080 PC for $2300. There's no way I'm going overboard and building a 128GB+ PC right now.

I've seen multiple RAM spikes. We had one at the height of the crypto hysteria IIRC but this is significantly worse and is also impacting SSDs. I kinda wish I'd bought 1-2 4TB+ SSDs last year but oh well.

We're really waiting for the AI bubble to pop. Part of me think sthat'll be in the next year but it could stay irrational substantially longer than that.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#53

Post by magicalhippo »

Aurornis wrote: post #49
magicalhippo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No such bundle deals where I am. Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k. Cheapest 64GB kit is $930. The kit I was oh-so-close to buying was two 6400 64GB sticks. Not gonna buy now, not that desperate. I have a spare AM4 board, DDR4 memory and heck even CPU, I'll ride this one out. Likely skip AM5 entirely if something doesn't drastically change.

> Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k. That's not far from the bundle deal above, once you subtract the $700 CPU. If you really need 128GB the 5600 kit is fine. Having 208MB of total cache on the CPU means the real world difference between a 5600 kit and a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases. If you don't need to upgrade then clearly don't force an upgrade right no…

> I just wanted to comment that $4K for 128GB of RAM is a very bad price right now

Oh absolutely. Just mentioned it since I was very close to buying it back then, and now it's completely bonkers.

That bundle deal is quite well priced all things considered, it basically prices the memory where it was. Again, sadly no great bundle deals here.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#54

Post by magicalhippo »

stingraycharles wrote: post #35
throwaway85825 wrote: post #33

It's disappointing that they had this for years but didn't release it until now.

I think it’s mostly that they had leftover cache.

Makes sense. RAM pricing surely has lead to a fall of AM5 high-end CPU purchases, might as well try to get some extra cash from those who still buy. Bin the remaining now non-X3D chips as something else.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#56

Post by timschmidt »

fakwandi_priv wrote: post #51
jofzar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want a x3d because a game I play is heavily single threaded, I have the income and the financial stability but I can't in any good conscious upgrade to am5 with the ram prices. It's insane

AMD had an upgrade path with the 5700x3d, assuming you’re on AM4. Just reading now that they went out of production half a year ago which is a shame. I was very impressed being able to upgrade with the same motherboard 6 years down the line.

I'm the mythical customer who went from a 1700X in a B350 motherboard near launch day to a 5800X3D in the same board (after a dozen BIOS updates). Felt amazing. Like the old 486DX2 days.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#58

Post by Panzer04 »

jofzar wrote: post #37
magicalhippo wrote: post #25

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

I really want a x3d because a game I play is heavily single threaded, I have the income and the financial stability but I can't in any good conscious upgrade to am5 with the ram prices. It's insane

What game, if you don't mind my asking?

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#59

Post by Panzer04 »

snvzz wrote: post #50
magicalhippo wrote: post #25

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

I am glad I decisively ordered 96GB (2x48) DDR5 ECC back in June, alongside the 9800x3d. I hope this is still enough for the planned upgrade to Zen7 in 2028.

You're basically me. I was mulling 48 vs 96, decided 200$ wasn't worth quibbling too much over and bought 96GB in August.

Feeling pretty chuffed now XD (though still sad because building a new PC is dumb when RAM costs more than a 24 core monster CPU)

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#60

Post by coppsilgold »

wmf wrote: post #24
cwzwarich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/blob/main/src/soc/intel...

Context: Early in the firmware boot process the memory controller isn't configured yet so the firmware uses the cache as RAM. In this mode cache lines are never evicted since there's no memory to evict them to.

There may be server workloads for which the L3 cache is sufficient, would be interesting if it made sense to create boards for just the CPU and no memory at scale.

I imagine for such a workload you can always solder a small memory chip to avoid having to waste L3 on unused memory and a non-standard booting process so probably not.

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